Review: In the Hours of Darkness by Tygati

I received a copy of this story from publisher in exchange for honest feedback.

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preorder page at Less Than Three Press

Published by Less Than Three Press
Available on September 29th, 2015.

You're not going to believe this because of my reputation as a lady's man, but I'm incredibly awkward when talking about sex. It's not that I feel awkward, it's that I'm going to make you feel awkward listening to me. Or I'll feel awkward that I think I'm making you feel awkward... One of us definitely going to have weird feelings about the whole thing. My brain goes into fits of giggles at any euphemism for genetalia or sex acts and I end up clamping down hard on that impulse by picturing it as literally as written which snowballs into simultaneous confusion and amusement (and occasional repulsion). That's all well and good when I'm sitting at home reading, for example, dragon erotica, and less fun when one or both of us is naked. Lucky for you I have pants on right now and am using this rambling preamble mostly to get to this point: I have read enough bizarre and stilted sex scenes in fantasy/scifi books to know that this one is not that, it is erotica and I am not the person to evaluate its merits. So I'm going to leave the discussion of the sex scene to someone else. For me, it detracted just a little from my enjoyment of the story not out of lack of skill by the writer but because I was enjoying the story and characters by that point and felt like that scene shifted focus from adding characterization to titillating.

Official blurb:

On the frontier planet No Man's Land, Sheriff Charlie Colcord upholds the law and protects the people of Deadwood Gulch. His job is difficult and often dangerous due to the vicious native creatures which inhabit the plains and mountains of Noman, but Charlie and his riders have one advantage: dragons. 

But the dragons come with their own difficulties in the way of a secret known only to a few. Charlie is a man used to keeping secrets, and it's not the dragons' secret that keeps him up at night. His secret is known to only one other, and keeping it makes their lives complicated enough that hunting monsters on the plains of Noman is almost relaxing.

I really liked the faux-western setting of this story. Maybe it was the beautiful cover art, but the mental cache of landscapes from which I pulled to picture the planet of No Man's Land was the area around the Grand Canyon in Arizona and Garden of the Gods in Colorado. While Tygati gives a lot of touchstones to the wild west for readers to latch on to and use to build the world, there isn't a lot of description, so I was left to my imagination. Luckily, as a kid, I was taken on a lot of roadtrips through the Southwest US, so I had a lot to pull from. Swap out a lot of the wild west elements for fantasy/scifi elements (electric whips, rayguns, strange fauna, etc), and that's the setting of this story in a nutshell.

The relationship between Charlie and Zorevan (the dragon) was interesting though I didn't feel myself sink into that "romance" place. I want to keep reading, but not because I find their romance sweet. In fact, I find it a bit scary. Zorevan "claimed" Charlie while he was a young teen and is incredibly territorial and protective. He's also stubborn and dominating. I think Charlie's affection for Zorevan is genuine, but even he acknowledges that he doesn't have much of a choice.

As far as other characters go, they were pretty one-dimensional. There was the Mayor, the only female character so far, who relentlessly hits on Charlie, and Jeremy Jasper, the troublemaking kid who won't go to school. Charlie actually has a great moment with Jeremy where he figures out how to motivate the kid. I expect the cast of characters and their characterizations to expand as this series continues.

Overall, despite some problems, I liked Charlie as the wild west Sheriff and I'm interested to find out what happens on the planet. I might read the next instalment just to find out what happens to Jeremy Jasper.

Comic Review: Jem and the Holograms: Showtime by Kelly Thompson

Jem and the Holograms: Showtime (collects issues #1-6)
Published by IDW
Available October 29th
Written by Kelly Thompson
Art by Sophie Campbell and Amy Mebberson

The new Jem and the Holograms comic is everything I could have possibly hoped for: fashion, cheezy songs, romance, and band drama.

The first story arc, collected in Jem and the Holograms: Showtime, follows essentially the same plot as the first episode of the television show. Jerrica, a bland young woman with stage-fright, fronts a band with her awesome adopted sisters. They are going to enter a music competition against the Misfits, but Jerrica's anxieties almost ruin everying. ...until she discovers that her father, now deceased, left her a secret hologram-creating AI called Synergy. With Synergy's help, Jerrica becomes Jem and everything seems to be saved.

If you can't tell already, Jerrica bores me to tears. She's too perfect and her perfect romance with Rio makes me gag.

So, let's leave Jerrica (and Jem) behind for the rest of the cast, because they make this comic more than worth picking up.

First up, and my favorite part of the entire comic: Kimber. Kimber is the youngest of the sisters, impulsive, and girl crazy. She can be capricious and forget her obligations while chasing her obsessions, but she's there for her sisters when it counts and she's always trying to be better.

Her current obsession (and the best parts of the story) is Kimber's romance with Misfit's keytarist Stormer.

I love everything about Stormer. I love seeing a plus-sized lady do more than break furniture or be comic-relief. I love that she gets to be fashionable. That outfit above isn't even her best outfit in the comic, but I want you to have that moment of being tacken aback at how gorgeous Stormer looks dressed for the show.

Stormer looking....stormy.

Stormer is the soul of the Misfits. She's patient where Kimber is impatient. She reaches out when Kimber runs away. Their courtship had me going through all of the ups and downs of a new romance.

Shana (purple) getting in the middle of Aja (blue) and Kimber (pink) fighting.

Next up is Aja, the guitarist for The Holograms, and Shana, the drummer. They're definitely side-characters in this arc, but I think they'll both get a lot more development as issues pile up. There have been hints of it already.

No review of the characters could go without mentioning Pizzazz, frontwoman for the Misfits. She's everything bad you've ever heard about a diva. Two-faced, vengeful, wrathful, and vain. She's a mustache-twirling villain. I have hopes though, that one day she may realize that she doesn't have to put Jem and the Holograms down to be on top.

The art, as you have seen, is gorgeous and clean. Before I read any issue I flip through the pages marveling at how pretty everything is. The full-page layouts when the bands are performing capture eighties girl band glam in all its glory.

Now that I'm all caught up, I can't wait to get home and break open issue #7!

Review: If Then by Matthew De Abaitua

I received an advanced copy of If Then from the publisher in exchange for honest feedback.

Amazon link

Available: September 1, 2015
Awards: none yet
Challenges: New in 2015

"'Can I stop this?' he whispered. 

'Your decisions are made six seconds before you are aware of them. What you think of as free will is post-rationalization. You live in the past, James.' 

'No second thoughts?' 

'Your decision has already been made. Don't waste my time with excuses." -Location 1696

Here's the official blurb:

In the near future, after the collapse of society as we know it, one English town survives under the protection of the computer algorithms of the Process, which governs every aspect of their lives. The Process gives and it takes. It allocates jobs and resources, giving each person exactly what it has calculated they will need. But it also decides who stays under its protection, and who must be banished to the wilderness beyond. Human life has become totally algorithm-driven, and James, the town bailiff, is charged with making sure the Process’s suggestions are implemented.  

But now the Process is making soldiers. It is readying for war — the First World War. Mysteriously, the Process is slowly recreating events that took place over a hundred years ago, and is recruiting the town’s men to fight in an artificial reconstruction of the Dardanelles campaign. James, too, must go fight. And he will discover that the Process has become vastly more sophisticated and terrifying than anyone had believed possible.

I loved the characters of James and Ruth. They used to be average people, they had white collar jobs, got married, wanted to start a family, and felt helpless when their security disappeared. When a possible solution appeared they did what they thought was necessary to survive. They put themselves in the hands of The Process trusting that it would look after them. Their sense of betrayal when The Process started behaving incomprehensibly is an amplification of the kind of betrayal we all feel when our governments and politicians let us down.

I found myself fascinated by how the author used tense shifts to signal who is in control and to keep me off-balance. When the characters are in control of themselves narration is in past tense, when The Process is in control narration is in present tense, which makes sense because The Process is in an eternal "now", constantly manipulating the eponymous "then". If A happened, B is what The Process is doing. Over and over, blindingly fast, astronomical numbers of Ifs and even more Thens, until even the story must bend into the present tense to follow James under The Process's control.

The tense also keeps the book feeling surreal. The past tense is used when describing the characters' "present", which is also a regressive future to the reader. The present tense is used when describing the present-as-controlled-by-The-Process, which is a mimicry of events in our past.

"Since the procedure, his forgeries have taken a new quality. He forged an eggshell that when cracked releases albumen and yolk which react to hot oil to form a perfect round fried egg. It is only when you eat the egg that you realize it is made of paint." -location 2177

Besides a surreal atmosphere, there is some perfectly executed and beautifully described weirdness in If Then. Every once in a while, just when things are starting to feel, if not normal, consistent, De Abaitua drops in reminders that the people of Lewes live in a manufactured reality, carefully controlled by something that can quantify, but not understand, humanity. I was drawn into James' perceptions over and over just for us to be reminded that people and their actions were not genuine.

I can't recommend this book more highly. It's slipstream fiction for polymaths. If Then flips off expectations of genre and leaves me feeling like I'm riding its shockwave into the future of literature.